Tag Archives: UC Riverside

Orange You Glad?

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UPDATE: Last year we Viewed the Washington Patent Navel Orange Tree in Riverside.

Recall the (surprisingly elegant) gauzy pavilion that was pitched eight years ago by UC RIverside scientists, as a stop-gap quarantine against the Asian citrus psyllid? Pomona be praised, something works. PROGRESS!

A disease that has devastated Florida citrus and threatens California crops may finally be tamed by a new treatment discovered by scientists at UC Riverside. The disease, known as citrus greening disease, showed up in Southern California eight years ago. It’s caused by a bacterium known as CLas, also called Huanglongbing or HLB, according to the university. It spreads through an insect called the Asian citrus psyllid. When a tree is infected, its growth is stunted, it develops lopsided, green fruits, and eventually it stops producing altogether.There was no cure, so growers often resorted to spraying antibiotics or chemical pesticides to prevent infection. ‘There’s also other methods that are non-chemical, where they actually have to wash these oranges or lemons and remove stems and leaves from the fruit,’ Riverside County Agricultural Commissioner Ruben Arroyo told KPCC/LAist.
But the disease was wreaking havoc on crops anyway.
The new treatment was discovered by UCR geneticist Hailing Jin. It’s a compound found to occur naturally in a citrus relative known as a New Zealand fingerling lime. Jin traced the genes that give the fingerling lime its natural immunity and discovered that one of these genes produces the compound. After testing, Jin found the trees improved within a few months when they were treated by spraying their leaves or injecting them with the compound. UCR says the treatment is easily manufactured, safe for humans and requires application a few times a year.”

— Website LAist.com reporting July 9, 2020

Public research, conducted at a public university, for public benefit. UCR in fact, was specifically founded because the residents there had a peculiar, but lucrative, local industry unlike any other product produced anywhere else in the United States. Local citizens lobbied the state, saying they needed local scientific support for their unusual crop to flourish:

“In 1907, the predecessor to UCR was founded as the UC Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside which pioneered research in biological pest control and the use of growth regulators responsible for extending the citrus growing season in California from four to nine months. Some of the world’s most important research collections on citrus diversity and entomology, as well as science fiction and photography, are located at Riverside.”

— Wikipedia entry on UC Riverside

The lead researcher, Hailing Jin, seems to be a Chinese immigrant to the community of Riverside. Citrus comes from China, and over the years Chinese settlers have brought and cultivated many varieties that have enriched the state immensely.

In the light of yesterday’s post about Universities, and the key role that foreign students play at any enlightened academy; and William Robertson’s distillation of the reciprocal economic role Universities play in the life, wealth and health of their host cities, I read this news with a smile.

I leave apart, for the moment, questions about how or whether the new elixir will be cheaply made available, which would secure the true economic benefit to society, or whether the public will be cheated as the formula is given away to a monopoly, which would then just wrap its dead-claw tightly around the public’s throat. Those are questions voters get to decide every two years. But the University, from the top scientists, to the lab technicians, to the groundskeepers who maintained the white gauze pavilion for eight years, has acquitted itself admirably.



Navel Gazing

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In the spring of 1875, Eliza Tibbets carefully unwrapped the root balls of two seedling orange tree grafts she had received in the mail (via ship, train and stagecoach) from Washington D.C. Following the instructions of her friend, the USDA botanist William Saunders, she planted them in her yard in Riverside.

Eliza Tibbets back East.
Eliza and Luther in California

A few years earlier, Eliza and her (common-law) third husband, Luther Tibbets, had decided to close the dry goods store and leave Fredericskburg, VA. Both had been married before, with children; they were Swedenborgians, rapidly converting to Spiritualism, and ardent abolitionists and supporters of Reconstruction. [They have been described as “carpetbaggers.”] This didn’t make them popular in Fredericksburg, especially when Eliza’s son, James Simmons, fathered a little girl, Nicey, with a freedwoman. The whole family decided to leave town, Nicey included, and re-start life by pioneering in the genteel, free-thinking, arts-and-culture, gentleman-farming colony being planned on the romantic-sounding Santa Ana River, a town called Riverside.

The settlement corporation’s brilliant scheme, hatched just after the Civil War in 1866, was to develop mulberry plantations, seed them with millions of silkworm eggs, and build up a sericulture in Southern California. This collapsed when the French worm-handler on the project, M. Prevost, the only one who knew silk, dropped dead in 1870. The land, if not the worms, was saved when statesman John W. North stepped in and took over the scheme. North had already founded Northfield, MN; and the University of Minnesota; so as freelance Founders go, he topped the A-list.

Read more about North, a powerhouse among pioneers.
William Saunders, Superintendent of the USDA’s Experimental Propagation Gardens in Washington

With the failure of silk in mind, Eliza stopped in Washington and asked Saunders to recommend a crop that would thrive in that climate. It was one of the very first real chances the USDA got to serve its purpose since Pres. Lincoln founded it: to help Homesteaders select crops, and aid them in developing scientific American agriculture across the range of our nation’s climates and soil types. It must be said, Mr. Saunders knocked it out of the park in recommending navel oranges to Eliza. The trees derive from a sterile spontaneous mutation, that just growed, from a rootstock in Bahia, Brazil. Mr. Saunders propagated samples of this unique variety, nurturing Eliza’s cuttings in the Smithsonian’s greenhouses on the National Mall.

Eliza knew she had to get the roots established in the hot hardpack, and since Riverside was so recently settled, it hadn’t yet finalized its irrigation system; she had to be as frugal as possible with water. So, the legend goes, Eliza saved up her dishwater each day and tossed it on the saplings. They grew in the California sunshine so quickly, and bore fruit so delicious, that all her neighbors asked her for cuttings. She obliged, not charging for the cuttings because, she reasoned, the U.S. government developed these on behalf of the whole people. 15 years later, there were half a million “Washington navel” trees in California, a quarter of a million of them within the Riverside city limits. Not only had the colony found its cash crop, the city had become the center of one of the wealthiest agricultural belts in the world, shipping sweet, seedless navels by the freight-car load. The colonist-neighbors of Riverside were millionaires!

Not the Tibbetses. Somehow — does it really matter how? — the family went bust in 1888. That same year, Nicey, who had grown up as Riverside’s first African-American citizen, died in a tragic drowning. [I like to imagine the little girl with a shovel and pail, helping her grandmother plant those first trees; or maybe helping her lug the basin of dishwater over to dump on the new “orchard.”]

The trees, which everybody in town seems to have always recognized are sacred, have been moved several times. In 1907 they were transplanted to the grounds of the Mission Inn — then still a little adobe guesthouse called the Glenwood Inn. For that re-planting, the spade was manned by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, Himself. Sadly this tree doesn’t survive.

The sole surviving tree, the official Patent Washington Navel Orange, was moved to the completely unremarkable corner of Magnolia and Arlington, where it has been cared for by the UC Riverside.

Last year, the threat of the invasive Asian citrus psyllid forced them to erect a high-tech sun-permeable, insect-resistant screen. You really can’t see the tree at all, but it is clear that it is still being taken seriously as a scientific specimen.

Eliza was a colorful woman who epitomizes the legend of California as the “Land of Fruits and Nuts.” She certainly was eccentric, in her Queen Victoria drag. Riverside accepted her as a founding mother, and even supported her macabre career as a medium and seance-organizer, but was skeptical of her modern, un-churched mode of co-habiting, her progressive ideas, and her mixed-race family. She is remembered in the center of Riverside by a flamboyant bronze, “The Sower’s Dream,” by sculptor Guy Angelo Wilson. It is beautifully located, in an orange grove on the pedestrian mall outside the Mission Inn.

The statue is perfectly, extravagantly, bizarre, a figurative fantasy of Eliza’s gifts, rather than her realistic effigy. Spiritualist, progressive, matrist, pioneer, Lady Bountiful, Pomona, Mother Africa, Good Witch, Mr. Wilson’s vision of Eliza Tibbets’s inner beauty is an exceptionally sensitive tribute to her civic legacy.